3 Explorer memory and Aboriginal celebrity Catherine Bishop and Richard White In the nineteenth century, those men that the British world dubbed explorers – always men – were celebrities. The designated leaders of expeditions were distinguished from other members of their parties: they wrote the journals, won the accolades, obtained the honours and had their portraits done, while those who accompanied them generally faded into obscurity. Expeditions were recorded in popular culture by the names of their leaders. We still remember Mitchell, Leichhardt and Sturt, but seldom those who accompanied them, whether European or Indigenous. Aboriginal communities remember those expeditions and the Indigenous people who accompanied them differently,1 but this chapter is concerned with historical memory and popular celebrity in a white Australian context. The myth of the lone explorer has been debunked in late twentieth-century scholarship, with a range of historians describing the infrastructure and personnel, including Indigenous participants, that underpinned most expeditions.2 Other studies have begun to focus on the women who accompanied various expeditions, and recently the details of the convict who guided Blaxland, Wentworth and Lawson over the Blue Mountains in 1813 have been retrieved.3 As other chapters in this volume show, the sources for such 1 See Fred Cahir’s chapter in Clarke and Cahir 2013. 2 See Reynolds 1990; Driver 2013; Kennedy 2013, esp. chapter 8. 3 Cadzow 2002; Yeats 2013. 31 INDIGENOUS INTERMEDIARIES studies are often sparse. Our particular concern in this chapter, by contrast, is those Indigenous guides who – despite the prevalence of the myth of the lone explorer – were acknowledged and even celebrated for their contribution to Australian exploration, and who are also reasonably well documented within the archives of exploration. Throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, Indigenous people accompanied European explorers in Australia. Usually but not always men, they were guides, interpreters, negotiators, collectors, hunters, providores, cooks, servants and stockmen, their multiplicity of roles similar to that of other members of the expedition, whether European or Indigenous. For convenience we use the terms ‘companion’ and ‘guide’ throughout this chapter, although, as at least one companion suggested, ‘explorer’, which we use for leaders of expeditions, might well be a more appropriate appellation for many of these Indigenous men. Don Baker usefully categorised Thomas Mitchell’s Aboriginal companions into four groups. There were the hired help, who were independent contractors familiar with European society, essentially simply providing labour. There were those he termed ‘passers on’, who often had no English. These were locals met with along the way; they simply wanted to ensure the expedition passed on with as little disruption to their territory and lives as possible. A third group, camp followers, often women or young boys, attached themselves to the expedition without payment and with varying degrees of perceived usefulness.4 Most highly valued were the professionals, who were seen as particularly skilled and were taken on for the entirety of the expedition. Recent scholarship has argued that, given the use made of their knowledge, the contribution of these Indigenous companions deserves more recognition: their particular role in ensuring the success and often the very survival of an expedition has been generally underestimated.5 Underestimated they may have been, but they were not entirely ignored. Given the logic of imperialism and the racial politics of the exploration era, the surprise is that, while white expedition leaders were the focus of adulation, a surprising number of Indigenous participants became quite well known and were, at different times, minor celebrities.6 Those that Baker called ‘professionals’ were most likely to be individually recognised and memorialised in some form. It is remarkable how many there were and how sections of European society were willing to acknowledge them, both at the time and since. Where this recognition 4 Baker 1998. 5 Blyton 2012; Reynolds 1990; Host and Milroy 2001; Cahir 2010: 22. 6 See Kennedy 2013; and Driver 2013, who particularly notes that different types of indigenous assistance were accorded different levels of acknowledgement. 32 3. EXPLORER MEMORY AND ABORIGINAL CELEBRITY has been noticed in the scholarship, it has often been characterised as simply patronising, grudging and/or unavoidable. This chapter seeks to probe further the nature of that recognition. The celebration of explorers in the nineteenth and into the twentieth century was contingent upon a particular intersection of class, gender and race. Explorers were respectable, white men and exploration was often a means of social advancement for them. Leading an expedition gave men a status that marked them apart. Thus expedition parties were constructed to varying degrees upon master–servant lines – and this extended to their fellow Europeans. Edward Eyre, for example, referred to his European companion John Baxter as a ‘faithful follower’, using similar language to that which he used to describe his Aboriginal companion Wylie. This was also almost by definition a masculine world, and female participants were barely acknowledged at the time and even less remembered by posterity. Turendurey, guide and negotiator for Thomas Mitchell, was one of the few, and she was not much celebrated.7 Nevertheless, while in the popular imagination the explorer was a white male, that same popular imagination singled out particular Indigenous individuals for attention throughout the nineteenth century. Men such as Jackey Jackey, Wylie, Yuranigh, Mokare and Tommy Windich acquired some fame in their lifetime and have been celebrated in various ways since. Often, as we will see, these were men whose relationship with the expedition leader was long-standing. In the lifecycle of celebrity, there are four periods to consider. First there is the recognition received on the completion of an expedition, in the celebrations that followed and on publication of the journal. A second moment of recognition occurs upon the guide’s death, when obituaries and memorials might appear. In both of these forms of acknowledgement, the expedition’s leader was usually instrumental. The third and fourth phases in the cycle reflect a broader politics of social memory. The third is the period of Stanner’s ‘great Australian silence’, when Aboriginal Australians were generally – though not altogether – written out of history.8 Stanner dates this from around the 1930s, although other historians find its origins in the closing decades of the nineteenth century.9 It is in this period that guides were most likely to be forgotten, and yet during a number of local expedition centenaries they were acknowledged in various ways. Finally, there is the period since the 1960s, when white Australia began to discover a black history. 7 Even the few white female explorers went unheralded: the diary of Emily Caroline Creaghe, who accompanied her husband and Ernest Favenc in the late nineteenth century, remained practically unnoticed in the Mitchell Library until the end of the twentieth century. 8 Stanner 1969. 9 Henry Reynolds dates the silence from the late nineteenth century, as white explorers became the heroes of Australian history, the ‘discoverers’ of Australia. Reynolds 2000: 18–20. 33 INDIGENOUS INTERMEDIARIES At the end of an expedition At the end of a successful expedition, there was generally a round of dinners and public occasions, when speeches were made, leaders were feted and exploring parties made much of. Explorers wrote up and published their journals, not only to record their achievements and to ensure and manage their public reputation, but also to make money. In the immediate aftermath of an expedition, the questions of who was recognised and for what were crucial because it could set the pattern for posterity. The focus was inevitably on the formal leader, but in their distribution of honours and credit, expedition leaders could not only acknowledge Indigenous participants but single them out for attention. Naming places One of the presumptions of European explorers was that they felt at liberty to name the natural features of the country through which they travelled. Some attempted to find out the local Indigenous names, regarding this as a more ‘scientific’ approach, but most took the opportunity to use the names of patrons, friends – or themselves.10 As Nigel Parbury says, credit for discovery was always attributed to the white men.11 Nevertheless the names given to places included those of both Indigenous and European expedition members, suggesting that the expedition leaders recognised something of a collaborative effort. In 1807 George Caley named Moowattin River after his Indigenous companion, Daniel Moowattin, who ‘discovered’ the Appin Falls. It appeared as the Moowattin River in the atlas accompanying Matthew Flinders’ Voyage to Terra Australis in 1814, but was later renamed the Cataract River.12 In 1846 Thomas Mitchell named Yuranigh’s Ponds in honour of one his guides, although perhaps in this case it was somewhat tongue in cheek, as Yuranigh had objected to sitting close to that stretch of water because of the danger of attack by ‘wild natives’.13 In 1874 John Forrest named Windich and Pierre Springs, along the present day Canning Stock Route, in recognition of two of his Aboriginal companions. Windich Springs was an especially important find, ‘a fine permanent spring’, which Forrest characterised as ‘the best springs I have ever seen’. According to one report, Tommy Pierre was the first to find ‘his’ spring, although this is not confirmed in Forrest’s journal.14 The Jardine brothers overlanding in Queensland named a welcome watercourse Eulah Creek after ‘the most trusty’ of their ‘black boys’, ‘old Eulah’, who found it for them in 1865.15 Even Christie Palmerston, who is 10 Carter 1987. 11 Parbury 1986. 12 Smith 2005. 13 Mitchell 1848: 327 (25 September 1846). 14 South Australian Register, 7 November 1874: 2S; Forrest 1875, chapter 5: 28 May 1874. 15 Sharp 1992: 69; Jardine 1867, chapter 1.